A Season of Reading: From Submarines to Software
This quarter's reading list is a broad mix of history, technology, and memoir, spanning everything from the mechanics of submarine warfare to the sociological pressures of modern adolescence. While several books stood out as exceptional, a notable theme was the disappointment found in works that promised technical depth but delivered something else entirely.
Dispatches from the Front Lines of Technology
Two books on this list tackled the subject of engineering and technology from very different angles—one a corporate biography, the other a practical programming manual. Focus: The ASML way by Marc Hijink promised an inside look at the company behind EUV lithography. However, readers hoping for a deep dive into the physics and mechanics of these marvels will be let down. The book dedicates approximately 98% of its content to the human, political, and organizational saga, leaving technical readers with little substance. For an understanding of the technology itself, seeking out a high-quality visual explainer is a far better use of time.
In a similar vein, Advanced Hands-on Rust by Herbert Wolverson set out to teach the language through game development with the Bevy framework. This approach backfires, as Bevy is a large, opaque, and opinionated framework that forces the learner to conform to its rigid conventions. Building simple games from scratch would be a much more effective way to practice the language. Beyond the questionable choice of framework, the book suffers from poor editing, with code samples frequently out of sync with the accompanying project files, making it difficult to keep the builds working. Since Bevy updates rapidly, readers are also locked into the book's older version to avoid compilation errors. While it does touch on useful tooling, like benchmarking and crate best practices, these topics are hardly enough to justify the book's existence for someone trying to learn Rust.
A more successful technical read was Understanding Software Dynamics by Richard Sites. It provides a ground-up analysis of software performance using sampling and tracing to explain how CPUs stall and fail to make progress. A significant section is dedicated to the author's KUtrace system. However, even this ultimately failed to hold interest, suffering from extreme verbosity and dense walls of text that made it a tedious exercise to follow. For another perspective, Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang offers a look at a nation it labels an "engineer-driven society" contrasted with a "lawyer-driven" USA, discussing the impacts of this divergence on industrial policy, culture, and civil rights—an informative and well-written counterbalance to the more technical failures.
Historical Narratives and Skeptical Takes
The history section contains stories from both the 20th and 18th centuries. Thunder Below! by Eugene B. Fluckey recounts the author's command of the USS Barb during five deployments in the Pacific theater of WWII. Full of action, the book provides an engaging look at submarine warfare. While the writing is immersive, the commander’s actions often shock, walking the line between death-defying courage and sheer recklessness—a survivorship bias that is hard to ignore, especially given the account was written decades later. Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts explores an even earlier era, presenting parallel biographies of Carl Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon, two pioneering naturalists of the 18th century who laid the groundwork for modern biology. Despite its hyperbolically named title, it is an interesting and well-written piece on the origins of natural science.
Tackling subjects with a more critical eye, The Invention of China by Bill Hayton argues that the modern concept of a unified China—its peoples, territories, and language—was constructed roughly a century ago to serve a specific political agenda. Though dry, the book is a powerful, document-driven examination of national narratives, crystallized by Mao's famous quote, "Make the past serve the present." For a different kind of social analysis, Social Justice Fallacies by Thomas Sowell brings a data-driven approach to contemporary issues such as personal liberty and poverty, using historical statistics to dismantle political assumptions—a classic Sowell analysis.
Other works in this vein had mixed results. The Nuremberg Trial is a detailed and dutifully researched account of the proceedings, yet it is also somewhat dry and academic, staying tightly on the trials themselves. Good People: A Novel follows a family of Afghan refugees in early 2000s Virginia, telling a haunting mystery about their older children's journey into adulthood and assimilation. Also personally resonant, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone offers a poignant look at Atlanta families in 2020 and their struggles with housing. The stories are touching, with Goldstone's investigative work illustrating how precarious life becomes with "just enough" but no buffer. It impressively discusses the issue without heavy-handed preaching.
A Focus on Personal Storytelling and Societal Critique
The most personal works on the list center on introspection and place. Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod is a reflection on walking Japan's Kii Peninsula, yet it reads less as a travelogue of a foreign culture and more as an introspective journey tied to the author's own childhood. The Junglekeeper: What It Takes to Change the World recounts the conservationist author's efforts in the Peruvian Amazon to establish a forest protection organization. The trials are compelling, but the text is often overly embellished and tiringly hyperbolic. Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace analyzes the immense pressure on teens to achieve academically and athletically for top university admissions. The journalistic approach relies on anecdote mixed with data, which offers broader accessibility than academic studies but lacks the scientific rigor of other research.
Pure fiction fared reasonably well with A Table for Two, a collection of short stories that doesn't quite recapture the author's earlier classic but still displays excellent, whimsical writing. Two books of mathematics and history failed to connect for different reasons: Mathematics for Human Flourishing by Francis Su attempts to link the discipline with human meaning but comes across as too "kumbaya" to land for this reader.
